Cyberpunk 2077 News – NPCs, Animations & Dialogue, Night City!

In today’s Cyberpunk 2077 news we will be looking at how CDPR is developing the world of Cyberpunk, Night City and NPCs, and how they are making it truly unique, As well as how CDPR has stepped up their game with their revamped animation system and how it relates to dialogue.
So first we have a discussion with Environment city coordinator Hiroshi Sakakibara, who delivers some new details about creating night city and what their design philosophy is.
Now whilst he says making every building unique is a difficult challenge, he assures us that the world of Night City is very large and that in order to provide a visually interesting world, assets are created by eye and details like color and signage will be diverse and as non repetitive as possible. In the gameplay demo you can recall that a lot of the signage was the same, and we saw repeated vendors at times so that is something that they are iterating and working on for release.
The game director also made mention that Cyberpunk is a fusion of future and tradition and that it’s not quite science fiction, but at the same time it’s not contemporary.
Youll be able to find an old dirty Asian style building with a woodern door, with a cybertech device used to control the doors lock and this creates a mixed aesthetic of the setting.
Now CDPR also wants this Cyberpunk version of the city to feel distinctly Californian, as opposed to the rainy gloomy Cyberpunk dystopias weve seen before. Iconic neon lights and rainy night are still there, but there are also colorful buildings, palm trees and blue skies. As someone who really feels the depth of a dark and twisted world more deeply when its juxtaposed with color, I think this is a great design choice.
Due to it’s design, Night City isn’t bigger than the world of the witcher but Sakakibara believes it will feel the same size if not bigger.
Next we have a comprehensive PCGamer article where some interesting details regarding NPCs are unraveled.
In this article Stanis Swieciki talks about the creation process of NPCs. He claims that crowds are generated semi-procedurally to avoid repetition, mixing body parts, faces, clothes and hairstyles. In the final game they’ve promised to feature a great variety of heights, weights and body shapes. We’ve seen hints of this through the gameplay demo with some characters being beefier, leanier and having variations in their builds. We have also seen some pretty blatant repetiton, which signals that there is still work to be done in this department.
The article also goes in to a little depth regarding the animations and how the perspective changes will influence the dialogue. (Machai) Maciej Pietras, lead cinematic animator says “The third person camera in the witcher floated slightly above NPCs which we took into account when animating them. But now you can really look at what theyre doing close up and weve improved animations to reflect this. When we animate characters, even the NPCs, we think about their personality and their past. The way they move or something in their face might reveal something about them, we work from the inside out.”
Now this clear attention to detail can be seen in the Mexican holdup scene in the meeting with the Maelstrom. Although not a facial animation, we see V take her finger off the trigger when things have cooled down, a detail that could have been forgone by studios who aren’t as detail oriented.
When it comes to facial animations specifically however, they’ve changed the way they do them. Moving to a new muscle based system, and having a huge library of facial animations lets them pick out subtle details to incorporate in the face. Pietras adds the example of a street vendor and his excitiement through his body language and warmth of face as he ushers you over to his pop up noodle hut to take a look at his food.
Finally we have disappointing news about the VGAs. Marcin Momot tweeted yesterday that there wouldn’t be anything Cyberpunk related shown at the Video Game Awards and thus ive decided to cancel the livestream for December 6th. We will still have livestreams in the future, so follow me at Twitch.tv/theneonarcadeNA for cyberpunk realted content there
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